Crazy taxi seems like it would be best to remain a mid-budget single player game sold for a mid-budget price. Who wants this as an MMO? How can it possibly retain people for long enough to justify such an expense?

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

It’s going to effect battery life having windows on these. It is one of the reasons the Steam Deck does not run Windows.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

You are thinking of UserBenchmark, which is a stain on the PC gaming industry.

Here is my process for new cards: Pick a pricepoint, head over to Video Card Benchmark and scroll down until you find the first (ie fastest) video card that meets that price point. Also double check prices at PC Part Picker. For used cards, the chart is still pretty useful, just a bit more manual (and money saving!) to get used prices from eBay/Mercari.

I personally have an AMD bias though, since they have pulled way less shit than nVidia. But, that is your decision to make.

For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.

M.2 Enclosure

M.2 Drive to go in it

Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.

Firefox should have a little checkbox next to the decline button to always give the site that answer. Have used it several times.

There are some decently priced drives available used on eBay and Mercari, but they tend to get snatched up pretty quickly. Official refurbs are probably your best bet if you don’t want new, I know B&H sells official refurbs.

The main issue is people think ‘I spent $200 on this, it still works, I’ll sell it for $150 used’ and don’t bother checking what is actually selling. Both eBay and Mercari have a sold listings filter, which is a great way for both buyers and sellers to figure out what things are actually worth.

Then as a holdover we get Starfield, which pretty much shows there isn’t any creative talent allowed to breathe over there. My hopes for a solid future entry to the TES series died.

Soon the poors won’t be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners

This is the nice thing about indy devs. Many of them don’t pull this shit and it is likely a large reason indy games have increasingly grown in popularity. AAA game is basically synonymous with microtranscations at this point.

Actors and professional athletes both have an advantage: name recognition. There is only one Tom Holland, there is only one Michael Jordan. It doesn’t matter how many people are lined up, the industry cannot replace them 1-for-1. The same is not true of video game development. Think of the last video game you played, do you know the name of even a single developer that worked on it? Almost certainly not. That person will be replaced by one of thousands of people in line; Tom Holland cannot be. This gives actors and athletes significantly more bargaining power to affect change in the industry, such as forming unions.

The main issue with video game development is it is many people’s dream job. They are willing to put up with anything to get the job; until they aren’t, and then the next crop of fresh faces are waiting in line to get their dream job. In that setting, a union won’t form as there is just too much competition among prospective hires, too many people not doing research into the industry, and too many people willing to work insane hours for no gain.

Unlikely. The main issue comes with port forwarding, but you are locked out from doing that already. I say go for the triple NAT, put your own router after the ISP’s modem and then you have full control of your LAN.

I personally use an old self-built desktop running linux (TrueNAS and Windows also work). Getting a case with lots of drive bays is inexpensive. And it lets you do pretty much whatever you want with the NAS as it’s a full blown computer. I always found the prices for the purpose built NAS to be shockingly high.

Logical Increments is also a great place to start for self-builts. They have a range of suggestions for every price bracket.

https://www.logicalincrements.com/

Thisin! Links to a few min overview of a Ryzen based PoE mini-pc.

https://lemmy.world/comment/7886685

Level1Techs just posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW4WyuGKsho

Laptop class CPUs can though. AMD Ryzen chips are useful all the way down to 15w. There is a post in this thread of a mini-PC with one and PoE. Real happy that exists.

I would be interested in this as well. The Pi certainly works and I am running one POE. But the Pi can be very limiting.

If you are converting something, be aware PoE has a power budget of 15w and PoE+ has 30w. Though PoE++ can do 100w, I have not seen many switches with that.